Dieseldorff, Erwin Paul b. 1868 Birthplace: unknown d. 1940 Place of death: unknown
Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, a native of Hamburg, was one of the wealthiest and most influential coffee planters and merchants in the Alta Verapaz region of Guatemala in the early twentieth century.
Before migrating to Guatemala in 1888, he had been trained in the international trading firm of his uncle, C. W. Dieseldorff, in London. In Central America he began his career working for another uncle, H. R. Dieseldorff, who had a mercantile business in Coban, the regional capital of the Alta Verapaz, and imported consumer goods and ironware from Birmingham and Manchester. In addition, he volunteered at several German coffee estates (fincas) and learned how to grow coffee. Endowed with a substantial inheritance, Dieseldorff soon became one of the largest estate owners in the Alta Ve- rapaz. Around 1897 the Dieseldorff family, which included several brothers and nephews, already owned about 52,000 acres and 600,000 coffee trees and operated coffee-processing facilities (heneficiois) in Coban, San Pedro Carcha, and Panzos. The value of their land was estimated at 750,000 German Reichsmark. Dieseldorff continued to expand his estate in the following decades, and the family was among the few Germans who escaped expropriation by the Guatemalan government during World War II.In addition to his business activities, Dieseldorff had a lively interest in science and archaeology. During his early years in Guatemala, he accompanied the geographer Karl Theodor Sapper on some of his expeditions through Central America. His travel experiences strengthened his interest in botany and archaeology. He collected and studied medical plants in the Alta Verapaz and experimented with their commercial production. In 1908 he published a guidebook for prospective coffee planters in the northern regions of Guatemala. Three volumes on the culture and religion of the ancient Maya civilizations were published in Germany between 1926 and 1933.
Diesel- dorff also wrote several articles on Maya archaeology.His personal papers, scientific collections, and business correspondence are located in the Dieseldorff collection of Tulane University Library in New Orleans. They also include historic manuscripts like a sixteenth-century copy of the “Golden Legend” of the Kekchι Maya. Moreover, he collected dictionaries of Indian languages, manuscripts of Indian dance dramas, and drawings of Mayan ruins. He corresponded with German geographers, ethnologists, and archaeologists like Karl Theodor Sapper and Eduard Seler, as well as with Frederic W. Putnam (1839—1915), director of the Peabody Museum archives at Harvard University.
Michaela Schmolz-Haberlein
See also Sapper Family
References and Further Reading
Nafiez Falcon, Guillermo. “Erwin Paul Dieseldorff, German Entrepreneur in the Alta Verapaz of Guatemala, 1889—1937.” PhD diss., Tulane University, 1970.
Schmolz-Haberlein, Michaela. Die Grenzen des Caudillismo: Die Modernisierung des guatemaltekischen Staates unter Jorge Ubico 1931—1944: Eine regionalgeschichtliche Studie am Beispiel der Alta Verapaz. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993.
Wagner, Regina. Los alemanes en Guatemala, 1828—1944. Guatemala City: Editorial IDEA, 1991.